Eric S. Raymond

Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957), often referred to as ESR, is a computer programmer, author and open source software advocate. His reputation within the hacker culture was established when he became the maintainer of the "Jargon File". After the 1997 publication of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", Raymond became, for a number of years, a high-profile representative of the open source movement. Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1957, Raymond lived on three continents before settling in Pennsylvania in 1971. Raymond's mild form of congenital cerebral palsy motivated him to pursue a future in computing;his involvement with hacker culture began in 1976, and he contributed to his first free software project in the late 1980s. His primary contributions to open source software have been maintaining the fetchmail email client for a certain time, and gpsd. Other contributions have included Emacs editing modes and portions of libraries like GNU ncurses, giflib/libungif, and libpng.... full article at wikipedia